It’s going to be just us and the pod in the not so distant feature, no need for other forms of being in the world to be around us.
And then people will keep posting about their depression medication and about increasing suicide rates.
Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
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Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#52That was an amazing achievement, treating something like 10,000 dogs a year for 15 years! Now that the initiative has ended I hope that some form it continues since maintaining a sterilized and vaccinated population will be a lot easier and less expensive than waiting until things get out of hand again. Outsiders wandering in and escaped pets turned strays have the potential to undo much of their great work.
I don't get it. Why not just euthanize them? Surely that would be cheaper than sterilizing and vaccinating them all, and the benefits would be seen sooner.
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further.
Also, wtf?
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not odd. Sterilization without any additional measures is useless. People will keep buying and abandoning dogs. And if there's enough food, they will reproduce faster than you can catch and sterilize them
Citation needed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6940938/
Fertility control alone: 12% to 40% population decrease. More effective over longer time spans (up to 20 years)
Culling alone: Effective in rapidly reducing population short-term, population replaced through compensatory breeding or migration from other locations
https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/27935/1/Smith_LM_Biology_PhD...
Combined CNR and responsible ownership targeted several flows into and between the dog subpopulations: it prevented the street dog population from increasing through births and abandonment, and it increased the adoption of dogs from the shelter dog population to the owned dog population. This combined method had a synergistic effect: neither CNR nor responsible ownership applied in isolation was as effective at reducing street dog population size
The key result of this thesis is that methods targeting multiple sources of population increase, such as combined CNR [capture-neuter-release] and responsible ownership campaigns, will be most effective at reducing free-roaming dog population size
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#54Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Why not just euthanize them? Surely that would be cheaper than sterilizing and vaccinating them all, and the benefits would be seen sooner.
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further. Also, wtf?
To play devil's advocate here, I do think that human sensibilities about life preservation can be inconsistent and illogical.
Your comment itself is contradictory is it not? If I am to understand "Also, wtf?" to mean something like "euthanising dogs is immoral because it shortens their life", your other argument is that sterilisation is superior because it essentially starves the other dogs. How is starvation morally superior to euthanasia?
Caveat: I actually also have the same emotional knee-jerk response. I own and love a dog very dearly, and the idea of just "getting rid of all the dogs" doesn't sit well with me.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's impossible. Because where do street dogs come from? They come from homes. As long as dogs exist there will be street dogs. But at least they got a huge leg up on the problem.
That’s not true for the most part in South Asia. Here we have dog populations that are basically native and have lived alongside humans for a long time. So these dog population are not stray pet dogs.
A couple months ago, I was hiking in Nepal. The two of us had lunch at a restaurant on the trail where there was a puppy. One of us pet the puppy, the other fed it.
After lunch, as we continued the hike, the puppy started following us. For 2 hours! At first I thought we'd essentially stolen someone's dog. The Nepali guy I was hiking with explained that the puppy is basically a trail dog.
It soon became obvious that there were many dogs following people, hoping to get food. Eventually the puppy started following someone else who had more food.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#57It’s going to be just us and the pod in the not so distant feature, no need for other forms of being in the world to be around us. And then people will keep posting about their depression medication and about increasing suicide rates.
You should try actually reading the linked article, what they've done is good both for us and for the dogs. Unless you like dogs who are malnourished, unfed and have rabies.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You actually want the sterilized strays to remain so that they put pressure on the resources that would otherwise feed the unsterilized strays. That suppresses the stray population even further. Also, wtf?
To play devil's advocate here, I do think that human sensibilities about life preservation can be inconsistent and illogical. Your comment itself is contradictory is it not? If I am to understand "Also, wtf?" to mean something like "euthanising dogs is immoral because it shortens their life", your other argument is that sterilisation is superior because it essentially starves the other dogs. How is starvation morally…
It doesn't necessarily directly starve the other dogs, they'll have less energy to attempt to reproduce with. It's not an attempt to increase the death rate as much as it is an attempt to decrease the birth rate.
My "also, wtf" stands.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#59I wish Turkey would do this too. Street dogs gather in packs and periodically attack people: not just small children, they go after grown men and women who are just walking down the street during daylight hours. This is true in major cities, like Ankara. When I’m there I avoid walking around after sunset or in areas without people, primarily because I don’t want to be stuck in the open with 3 or 4 hungry street dogs…
> Street dogs gather in packs and periodically attack people: not just small children, they go after grown men and women who are just walking down the street during daylight hours. This happened to me at night in Istanbul 10 years ago. I was walking down a side street and a pack of 5-6 dogs noticed me and began to follow me. At first they were tentative, but increasingly the bolder ones in the group closed the distan…
Maybe someone from Turkey can shed light but it seems to have become much better. In 2019 all strays were tagged and I was under the impression any ill behaved one would be dealt with.
Re: Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated
#60100% is a big achievement in street dog unavailability - much harder than, say, 99.999%. In k-nines (un)availability, the cost usually increases by 10 * k to increment k by 1. It's tempting to imagine that they didn't actually get to 100%, and there are some hidden holdouts who have escaped the program and will re-establish the street dog population covertly.
> k-nines Intentional pun? :)
Ssh we're not supposed to make jokes here.